Thursday, September 21, 2006

deltasleep's Totally Vapid Halloween CollectionRunning time: 35:27 VBR mp3, 34.16 MBHere's a recording of a lot of things from my record collection that I find to be somewhere between creepy, brilliant, and unlikely. I focused this time on what I refer to as "light psychadelia" -records that feature strange instruments or effects in an otherwise mundane song, and that little bit is just enough to make it all feel strange. The closest this gets to stereotypes you probably hold about psychadelia(and that term is almost entirely meaningless) is the mystic moods orchestra.You can hear the beginnings of bands like AIR, Bertrand Burgalat, and every other recent imitation thereof. Hopefully these songs will give you as much inspiration and energy as they gave me.These are genuinely creepy records because they push things like delays and phasers in environments you don't expect to find them. They are used sparingly, and the results almost always catch the listener off guard. To top it off, they are used on a quality of recording thats completely unmatched today. The more I listen to records engineered and produced by people like Enoch Light, Arif Mardin, and Hugo Montenegro, the more I am blown away.A lot of these songs will require your patience for a moment, but think of it as a crescendo, or a tension building device. Wait for the weird synth passage, trust me. Some of them I admit, are just so effervescent that its creepy- like the ultra rarity among rarities that sounds just like the Free Design singing "Kites are Fun" except its actually Tony Mottola's Warm Wild and Wonderful instrumental version of the song.Featured on this record in some sort of order are the LPs: Muzak: Stimulus Progression, Mystic Moods Orchestra: Love Token, Switched on Bacharach, Les Baxter: Hell's Belles, Out of This World with the Richard Marino Orchestra, Enoch Light: Charge!, Honky Tonk and Percussion(also known as Will Someone Please Bring a Tuner to the Next Session) Hugo Montenegro: Lover's Collection, Tony Mottola: Warm, Wild, and Wonderful, Enoch Light: Spaced Out.Luxuriamusic.com says that they have no DJ slots open, I was really bummed. That would be a great way to get my mixes like these streamed. I'll show them, though. I am hoping to do this at least monthly, hopefully way more often.Enjoy this genuinely haunting and beautiful collection of songs that might have died if I hadn't saved them from the thrift store. One of them, "Enoch Light: Charge" is a bit tattered in one corner because a .40 cal round flew through the thrift store front window and through the glassware, through the record bin, and into a computer monitor in the back room. If that bullet had even so much as a slight change in trajectory, you would not be enjoying the first song on this mix.Was that inches away from this record being lost forever? It's possible.